Ready or not…

Boss has decided I am ready to start some concentrated work on lead/follow in latin.

My lesson yesterday was really interesting as it went in a direction I certainly didn’t expect. First, we did only latin and focused on rumba with a little bit of samba thrown in. Even on Wednesday, we were still doing mainly standard and actually moved from breaking down the waltz to breaking down quickstep.

We worked on breaking down the rumba routine and making small stylistic changes while also looking some at my body movements.

That was finished with some work in samba which led to Boss declaring me ‘ready’ to focus on lead/follow in Latin.

I should clarify, this is not lead/following the steps in latin, but working on leading/following the body movement in latin. I am finding it pretty intense to work on and all we are doing right now is some work on maintaining the proper tone and pressure as we move and responding with the correct hip movements. The basic exercise involves leaning towards Boss as he increases pressure and moving away and leaning back as he exerts pressure in the opposite direction. At the full range, I am leaning back enough (and so is he) that we are supporting each other, and at the other end we are very close together. It takes a lot of trust at both ends of the spectrum and I think that is where I am struggling some.

I am interested to see how this goes from here though. We have done a little bit of work previously on it, but we have never really focused on this aspect of lead/follow. I keep trying to lock out my elbows as we do it and one of the first things I have to learn is to relax them and allow the resistance to move from hand to hand through my body like it does in standard.

It’s not often Boss surprises me, but this sudden declaration of it ‘being time’ and that I am ‘ready’ to work on this did surprise me. It’s going to be an interesting challenge, I think.

On a slightly different note, there was a change in format for the pro/am for the local competition here in town and now the pro/am is non-competitive solos only. With that in mind, I agreed to do a solo and Boss and I have decided to revive an older mambo routine and revamp it. I haven’t done mambo in more than a year, so this is going to be fun to work on for the next couple weeks.

Post navigation

One thought on “Ready or not…”

Yes, we’ve done some of that type of work as well. Dancing is the ultimate onion. You keep peeling layers and there are just more things that are revealed. Which just means more things to work on. But it is all good.